![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
2011 books: MacAvoy
Dec. 26th, 2011 06:17 pmAfter a quiet period of some years, R.A. MacAvoy has started publishing again. Last year, she released In Between, a short novel or novella, and this year a full length novel, Death and Resurrection. Supposedly, Death and Resurrection contains In Between, but I didn't feel that any of DaR was familiar. I'll have to find In Between and reread it. DaR should be considered a series of closely related short stories about Ewen Young and his relatives and friends. Ewen is a Chinese-American painter who specializes in portraiture and is also a martial artist, taught by his uncle.
Ewen has a twin sister, Lynn, and they share a bit of a psychic connection. She always knows when something's wrong or troubling Ewen. Lynn works as a child psychiatrist and occasionally asks Ewen to help. Ewen is able to show someone his 'safe place', his recreation of a clearing in a park where he grew up. That can calm them and enable them to restart, in a way. In the beginning, Ewen's uncle is killed over a gambling debt, and Ewen is shot. His heart stops several times, but he is finally revived. He finds that he can now go 'in between' life and death more regularly and has gained some other powers. This brings him to the attention of the two police detectives on the case, and to a friend of one of them, Susan Sundown. Susan is a veternarian and uses her dog, Resurrection, on crime scenes to track and as a cadaver dog. Susan asks Ewen to help her find her uncle, a Native American man of power.
It turns out that a Native American spirit has begun targeting men of power, possibly including both of their uncles. Most other writers would take an entire novel to deal with this very terrible threat, but MacAvoy wraps up that issue about halfway through. Ewen, Susan, and Lynn has some other issues to deal with in the rest of the book, but nothing that I felt was as striking as the spirit in the first section. There's some Buddhist (both Chinese and Tibetan) discussion, but nothing overwhelming. In the final story, we don't even see the capture of the 'bad guy', because it's really not important to the tale that MacAvoy is telling.
I think it needs a reread in the coming year. It didn't hit me as a favorite book, but may well grow on me with more familiarity now that I know the story structure.
I have a book that should arrive on Tuesday (yea!) which should be the last book for the year.
Ewen has a twin sister, Lynn, and they share a bit of a psychic connection. She always knows when something's wrong or troubling Ewen. Lynn works as a child psychiatrist and occasionally asks Ewen to help. Ewen is able to show someone his 'safe place', his recreation of a clearing in a park where he grew up. That can calm them and enable them to restart, in a way. In the beginning, Ewen's uncle is killed over a gambling debt, and Ewen is shot. His heart stops several times, but he is finally revived. He finds that he can now go 'in between' life and death more regularly and has gained some other powers. This brings him to the attention of the two police detectives on the case, and to a friend of one of them, Susan Sundown. Susan is a veternarian and uses her dog, Resurrection, on crime scenes to track and as a cadaver dog. Susan asks Ewen to help her find her uncle, a Native American man of power.
It turns out that a Native American spirit has begun targeting men of power, possibly including both of their uncles. Most other writers would take an entire novel to deal with this very terrible threat, but MacAvoy wraps up that issue about halfway through. Ewen, Susan, and Lynn has some other issues to deal with in the rest of the book, but nothing that I felt was as striking as the spirit in the first section. There's some Buddhist (both Chinese and Tibetan) discussion, but nothing overwhelming. In the final story, we don't even see the capture of the 'bad guy', because it's really not important to the tale that MacAvoy is telling.
I think it needs a reread in the coming year. It didn't hit me as a favorite book, but may well grow on me with more familiarity now that I know the story structure.
I have a book that should arrive on Tuesday (yea!) which should be the last book for the year.
